Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati comes out as non-binary

Gulati starred in the soap for over a decade.

The actor, who portrayed Sunita Alahan in the popular soap for over a decade, made the revelation on Kaye Adams How to be 60 podcast.

Speaking on the podcast, Gulati revealed they had felt this way all their life, and only more recently realised there was a word to describe it.

They explained: “I’ve become more happy describing myself as a person. What do people call it now? Non binary. So, I suppose that’s who I am.

“I’ve never had a word for it, but I’ve learnt from our younger generation what that might look like in terms of a word, because I know what it feels like in terms of being me," they added.

They continued: “All the way through my life I’ve never had the words for that and I’ve never managed to explain that and I suppose my immediate family have not really thought about it.

“They’ve just thought: ‘Shobna is either extremely feminine or extremely masculine.’ Because I was just accepted as a person who fell out of the tree and equally the person who put on all this make up and did a dance.”

The former soap star explained how things when a sound engineer who they were working with explained what being non-binary meant.

“So, then they explained and I thought – ‘well, I feel like that, but I didn’t ever have that vocabulary.’

“They said that they saw themselves as a person and that the gender – the he or the she – wasn’t important to who they are. And I thought: ‘that’s all I’ve ever thought.’

“And I think now I’m free to say it out loud. I think people around me have accepted who I am for a long time without any explanation, but I suppose when I’m asked now, I’ll say it," they said.